Yesterday and last night we discussed the Subaru advertising campaign with NameMedia, the owner of Dropzone.com. (You may recall that NameMedia's involvement with the site is to sell and serve ads. All management and operational responsibilities are delegated D4DR Media, the previous owners of the site).

NameMedia sold this campaign to Subaru without our knowledge or involvement. The campaign started running yesterday, and entails rich media effects across the browser screen. Our position has always been that we strongly oppose any kind of invasive advertising like pop-ups, page take-overs or interstitials, hence we urged NameMedia to remove the ads. They have the final call however and decided to keep the campaign running, tweaking the implementation to ensure that a particular user will not see more than 3 of the ads each day. Further:

- The campaign will end on Oct 17th - There is an “x” box during the rich media extension that allows the user to stop the rich media. - The campaign is targeted for US users only.

They have the final call however and decided to keep the campaign running

Firefox + ABP = I haven't seen any ad in a very long time. This was done when the ads went beyond the simple top banner ad (with no or very little animation) and started to become annoying. That's too bad since I would have loved to been able to contribute to the ad revenue for the site by clicking on some ads, but it looks like things are even worst so this site will stay ad-blocked.

Thanks for the update. I can live with three times a day. I know you need ad revenue to run the site.

Might I suggest an angry e-mail to your LOCAL Subaru dealer? They pay into an ad fund to pay for this shit. If you tell them these kind of ads will make you buy from a different dealer, they might get the message.

I have been a long time user and participant in the dropzone.com forums, in fact being a moderator of two forums for several years. The new ad comapain you are promoting for Subaru is extremely invasive, and it prompted me to add an ad-blocker to my browser. Never before have I felt the need to use one, and in fact, I would rather not use one as sometimes, worthwhile images get blocked.

I would have been happy removing that functionality, but your decision to continue running that ad confirms my decision to keep the ad-blocker on. As a result, none of your advertisers will get any benefit from me seeing their ads. I know for a fact that many other users of dropzone.com are doing the exact same thing.

I'm the type of person that if someones advertising annoys me I am certain to NOT by their products. When are they going to figure this out? Pissing people off and annoying them hardly does good things to sell your products.

lol man take it easy...this site costs money to run...stop acting like such a little girl..

OMG THERES AN AD ON MY DROPZONE.COM PAGE!!!

this is the internet and this is how things work...

Not quite.

He's a paying customer, so this is actually how things work. His choice. Have you shelled out the cash to be a premium member? Then I don't think you get it.

I work in interactive relationship marketing, and those people who are loyal enough to pay for a subscription are the ones you want to keep happy. Acquisition costs are much higher than retention costs. Subscribers are what we like to call a 'captive audience.' If Name doesn't understand this, well, that's their problem.

More importantly, invasive/intrusive ads are the ones that get a site quickly labeled as 'spammy' by its users (and drive many of them away). Any interactive media company should understand its detrimental effect on basic usability.

I personally have now installed an ad blocker, and while I'm missing seeing some of the ads from relevant advertisers, I find it works quite nicely.

Our position has always been that we strongly oppose any kind of invasive advertising like pop-ups, page take-overs or interstitials, hence we urged NameMedia to remove the ads. They have the final call however and decided to keep the campaign running,